By GUY TREBAY

February 20, 2013

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.

Q. Why Russian churches?

A. When I was young, my mum bought a record of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto played by Jascha Heifetz. On the flip side was a concerto by Prokofiev. I was head banging to Prokofiev while my friends were head banging to the Rolling Stones.

Q. The church project didn’t start, though, for another few decades.

A. At a postcard fair, I came upon these postcards of Russian churches. I wondered if any of them survived. I wanted to get out into the countryside, and so friends in St. Petersburg found me Alexander Popov, a professor of atmospheric physics who did some driving on the side.

Q. How did you find the churches in the first place, without inventory or guidebook?

A. The region we covered is only a small part of Russia, but it’s still huge. The first time we set off for a place, it took us two days to get to our destination. We rummaged around for a week or so and came up with six or seven churches. You found them in a variety of ways and ticked them off as we went.

Q. Was the travel primitive?

A. In the early years, we traveled lots of kilometers on unmade roads. You’d drive for hours but not get bored. There are forests, vast forests like you’ve never seen before.

A. I shot lots of stuff in the Archangel region. When you found a church, you shot in whatever the weather was. I got very bold at one point and started going in winter, when it might be minus whatever degrees and you wondered whether you were going to die. You had to be careful about your fingers freezing to the camera.

Q. Was it strange for the locals to see this Volkswagen pull up with strangers looking for decrepit churches?

A. In recent years, people are trying to restore some of the churches. But when I first went, I found nobody cared. The history is obviously complicated. The church on the book cover is in Podporozhye. The first time I went with Alex, he asked a local chap if there was a key to the church and was told no. The next year I went again with Matilda, and again the man said no. Matilda kept talking until suddenly the man stood on a chair in his kitchen and rummaged around on top of a cabinet for a tin with the key inside.

Q. When you refer to the complex history, do you mean specifically Stalin, the Nazis, the end of the Soviet Union?

A. All of it. Certain churches were restored under certain regimes. Certain were moved. You still see signs on the front of churches saying they’re under the protection of the state when obviously they are not. If anything survived, it was because of local people. In many cases, even the icons were stripped out and used to make horse troughs or flooring, turned into firewood and burned.

Q. Why are these structures so vulnerable to neglect?

A. It’s the architecture of a log cabin. They rot when water gets in. One way to restore them is to disassemble the churches and replace the ruined timbers with new. Somebody sent me a picture of a church once that had been deconstructed and the logs left to rot. The money for restoration had somehow disappeared.

Q. Speaking of funds, are the wooden churches doomed?

A. Part of the idea of this project was to make people aware of these objects before it’s too late. Maybe an oligarch will get involved, maybe the state. I like to say that, for the price of a center forward for Chelsea, you could probably restore every church in the book. GUY TREBAY